"That Roman wh.o.r.e--?."

"Not her. The other. The first."

"Who?"

"Debra."

"Who is Debra?"

"Death."

Sean's flesh hardened as if touched in every place by a steel sword. He scratched at his collar, his sleeves.

"What...what do we do?"

"Prepare. When he is finished he...they will come for me."

"s.h.i.t."

The Father was silent momentarily. And then he said, with purpose, "I have been doomed by a prophecy I have no power over. Death has marked me. But I refuse to die at the hands of an infidel."

Sean shivered. "What...can I do for you, Father?"

"Vel caeco appareat."

Sean said, "'It would be apparent even to a blind man.'" And laughed, amazed with himself, that he should understand the words.

Amadeus nodded. "Then too, my beloved, you know what must be done."

"Ah...well, no."

"Take me." Horrified, Sean looked at him.

But the Father only said, breaking his pose and reaching for him, framing his face in his long hands and kissing him with sad pa.s.sion, "It is time, no? You have been awaiting this. Your desire. The Rite of Covenmaster is yours. Drink of me and be complete. Drink until I move within you, my beautiful slayer."

Sean hesitated, groaned, shivered. He wanted to protest, but then came his master's lips on his throat, caressing his thirst, his need, his hunger to be...more. More than some little wh.o.r.egirl's punching bag, more than Slim Jim's young prey or Alek Knight's rebellious little acolyte, more than the Stone Man. More than a punk stereotype with cotton between his ears. More-- But he would be what?

And all at once, Sean was afraid. Amadeus had lied. He was not a vampire, at least not the kind he had come to understand as real, the kind he was and Alek was and all or most of them were. He was not a victim of Lilithine blood. A subspecies of the human race. He was less, and more. A servant to strange forces, stranger understandings. A demon, a wraith. A beast and a priest and both borne of a savagery he had never known in all his life. Hungry. Starved. Incomplete. And some part of Sean's expanding intellect tried to reason this out, what Amadeus was with what he did, and failed.

After this Communion, this pa.s.sionate exchange of blood, what was he--Sean--to be?

What in h.e.l.l was he to be?

The cold kiss. The stab of bone-sharp teeth. The hiss of an uncoiling nest of snakes all about them. And in the spinning private cloister of Sean's mind he heard the answer: You will be everything you have always wanted to be...and everything you have ever feared. You will be Amadeus.

"But..." He gasped. That mouth. It was on him, in him, a living thing, separate from the Father, with its own hungers and desires. Sean shuddered yet again, leaned against the Father as the Father fed off of him, giving up the strength and red life so easily that the Father had lent him earl i er. Yes, he understood how that had happened now. What drove it. What had driven them both to destroy the girl. The hunger...nothing was like it in the whole world, nothing at all. Love was like that hunger. And now it was as if he were being loved by some underworld G.o.d. Hades. Satan. Set. It was as if he were being eaten alive by a cannibal lover. The girl...she had know this and willingly endured it. The h.e.l.l that was heaven...

Through the veil of pa.s.sion, Sean fought for his thoughts, his fears. "But...I only...only wanted to be something...more."

The mouth let him go. The beautiful and bloodslathered and unkind teeth let him go. "You will be everything."

"Everything..." Sean murmured as Amadeus held him close and stroked his throat, kissed his mouth and the chains of his tears, laid upon his face his b.l.o.o.d.y lip prints until the touch and taste and smell was so great, his hunger so far greater, he thought he might weep or die or simply implode from the force of it. Sean leaned into his master, felt no desires but that for giving in. The choices had all been made and be understood that the time for protest was over. It had ended the day he took the Father's hand and escaped the dorm with him. It had ended the day Slim Jim died and left a child with blood and mucus all over his face sitting on the floor, afraid to move, to even breathe.

And strange that in this moment of which he'd dreamt so long and so hard that his thoughts be filled not with images of Amadeus, nor even his mother, but of Alek Knight.

Alek. He had run. He'd escaped this.

Why?

"I will make of you a G.o.d on the earth," the Father whispered against his mouth, "a G.o.d whom none will again harm. No more hurt. eternal and unstoppable and accountable to no G.o.d for your sins."

"No hurt," Sean repeated, and he was not surprised that he wept keenly into the frost of his masters' hair, the sight of a dead man's shredded bloodless throat glowing at the center of his mind like an ember. And the woman--the woman torn like a doll. "Oh Jesus, Father, I love you. Save me, please. Please save me." The words did not seem foolish and they did not embarra.s.s him, and as he worshipped his master's face and hair with his kisses he felt his terror lessen. His soul and savior and power, he thought. How he wanted to die for Amadeus, crack his soul open upon the rock of the Father's divinity.

And when pressure at the back of his skull brought his kisses to the Father's throat he scarcely knew it or cared.

"Drink me," Amadeus invited. "Drink me and become."

Sean kissed him deeply with his every pa.s.sion, kissed and licked at his master's throat and the thin gla.s.s of flesh which was all that separated him from his eternity. His teeth ached and his mind screamed. And when his time came and he could hold off no longer, Amadeus held him fiercely and crooned to him in languages he could not fathom.

Booker dreamt, and in his dreams he walked upon a red desert full of white skulls. They were ancient things beneath his feet, those skulls, thin as eggsh.e.l.ls. And where he walked they shattered, and where they shattered came the angry red geysers of their ghosts. The sky above him was cramped and low, a mocking backwards-running river of blood. Horrible, all of it, like something Alek might paint on a good day. f.u.c.king Dali. Where the h.e.l.l was the exit?

Booker walked on, searching, but he did not hurry, because to hurry would mean to burst more of the skulls under his feet. He walked on and he kept his eyes steady on the flat, h.e.l.lish horizon far ahead, for he knew if he looked down he would see the millions of empty, screaming eye sockets beseeching him, and that would be too much; that would drive him mad.

He walked in that h.e.l.l for a thousand years. He walked until, at last, he came upon them. And stopped.

Upon a bed of bleached bones they loved. Booker watched them without shame and without revulsion. It was only proper after all that on their wedding day they should have a witness. They were both naked but wreathed in red silk and in the pearled sweat of their effort. He saw the pale narrow serpent of Alek's back, and he saw Debra beneath him, alive, a woman, innocent and seductive where she clung to her mate, her hair a mystical web of darkness spilling out and out around them, encircling them, binding them together.

Forever.

Booker envied Alek his angel. He always had.

A.

nd fr om his angel Alek drank, her precious blood lighting his flesh from within like light though a crimson window.

And slowly, as Booker watched, Debra greyed and withered in the arms of her twin, her flesh and bones brittling, cracking herself apart for him, to give and to nourish him. Spent at last, she was all red silk and sand in Alek's hands, her hair like the dark pelt of a fine kill.

Booker frowned. "You've killed her," he said.

Alek looked up at him with his narrow, flushed-red eyes, and Book knew then his mistake. Alek said, "I have become."

And Booker Jefferson jerked awake to the flickering, cinematic darkness of his Lexington Avenue penthouse apartment living room with its Klee originals and French lithographs and sunken Jacuzzi whirlpool. On the flat TV the Sat.u.r.day night silent film was on, Fritz Murnau's cla.s.sic, Nosferatu. Lousy joke. Booker stared at the blueness of the screen, at Count Orlock moving like animated death toward a victim all lily-skinned and innocent. He looked away, at his pale, grey, characterless furniture, the weepy neutral carpet and noncolored walls. Again the lithos, every one a mint and worth more than most blue collar workers made in a year.

On the floor by the door was his imported seven-hundred-dollar London Fog where he had carelessly dropped it on entering, and he thought absently, When the h.e.l.l did this happen? When did I go from being a Spike Lee-inspired tenement homey boy to f.u.c.king pampered Donald Trump? When the h.e.l.l did I stop being an in-your-f.u.c.king-face streetsmart kid like Alek?

Alek. He touched his brow and found it misted wet. His hand clenched into a fist, trembled slightly, and dropped onto the wooden armrest of his chair. He split the mahogany finish like kindling.

When did we stop playing streetball and getting subs down at Arnold's Soda Shop, he wondered, and going down to the Hudson in the summer and walking around the old railyard with our shirts off, looking for fun, looking for trouble, looking not to be bored-- I have become. Become what?

Debra, of course. f.u.c.king idiot.

He rose up from his fashionably anemic furniture in his rumpling of fashionably anemic Armani suit and Italian shoes and began to circle his psychotically tidy living room, seeing it and smelling the five spice curry in the take-out boxes on the coffee table, seeing the movie and knowing it was there, but feeling only a white, heavy, clockless silence.

I have become.

And what have you become, hey, Book? Other than a rich, sn.o.bby pain the in the a.s.s like all the folks you and Alek used to make fun of down on Central Park West, hey? What are you other than some black-boy- made-it-good stereotype with plenty money and an internship and a Jag and about three hundred dead vampires to your f.u.c.king name?

What the h.e.l.l are you?

And there, trapped inside his silence and his questions, Booker circled the room once more.

26.

Sometime after midnight, the Covenmaster of the New York City branch of slayers rose to standing on the golgotha's sacred dais, the sand of the spent host crunching under his heels and a deep long Abbey breeze casting the few remaining white crystalline hairs like spider's silk against the altar's thousands of bony faces.

The skull in his hands crumbled away, The Covenmaster let the bone dust fall between his fingers, then he put out those hands to see the grinning wall of dead bones. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," he said and smiled. The sh.e.l.l was finished, the creature reborn once more. He took away his hands and explored his new body from collarbone to hipbone.

So strange to be young and new again. Each time it was a new experience, but after so many years, so many hosts, it was an experience he grew accustomed to very easily.

He went directly to his cell and shook out his good homespun clothing, put them to his face. In his imagination he could still smell in them the salts of the Atlantic, and the pitch and greenwood of the great ship. He remembered his covenant with the church and he remembered what it meant. He was tempted to dress himself in these clothes, the collar and the cloak and the Quaker's hat--but to do so, he knew, would be to undermine all his work this evening thus far. Instead, he went to Sean's cell and found among his things a T-shirt and jeans and his slayer's coat made of leather. He found the whelp's wrist blade with its intricate little mechanism, and this he strapped on his forearm and tested the slide of the blade using the knowledge inherent to the temple. Satisfied, he armed himself with a sword as he had always done in the past before a great mission. Not his sword. Hanzo's sword.

Alek's sword.

Alek.

Yet would be their time.

He went to the parlor and summoned the remnants of his Coven down to the Great Abbey. Aristotle fidgeted in his seat and thrummed his fingers as Amadeus explained his instructions to them. Robot said nothing, of course.

The shadows of the skylight grew long. Nightfall. And finally, when silence fell across the Abbey and he had finished his address, Aristotle said, "So, like, when did G.o.d die and put you in charge, whelp?"

Amadeus was crouched atop the Coventable in front of the whelp, his wrist blade under the whelp's chin before all the words were out of his ignorant mouth. "About an hour ago, actually. Cross me not, Aristotle."

He smiled.

Aristotle gasped soundlessly with the instrument pressed firmly against his carotid artery. He swallowed, gathered what little wits he owned. "What--oh, Jeezus Christ--he was right--someone really was going to kill him--"

Robot was on his feet, coming around the table like a train. Without removing the blade from Aristotle's throat or otherwise turning away, Amadeus sent his messengers out, heard and felt them wrap like Punjab la.s.sos around the bulk of Robot's body and lift him quite literally off his feet. Robot sucked in great, greedy mouthfuls of air, the only sounds of terror the big mute was capable of making, and flailed uselessly in the grip of Amadeus's personal, Medusan retinue of servants. They rattled irritably and tossed him away like a child tossing a rag doll across the room in a fit of temper. Amadeus stepped down off the table, lithe like a cat, and cast his blind gaze down upon the Coventable. It trembled and rattled a moment as if under the spell of a lunatic seance. Then it turned end over end and splintered into shards against the far stone wall.

The tapestries rippled as if touched by invisible ghosts.

The golgotha herself moaned dryly.

Amadeus felt the vibration of the shattered wood vibrate all throughout the floor and up through the soles of his feet, and he knew Aristotle felt the same. "Do you believe in your heart that the Sean boy is capable of these kinds of miracles, whelp?"

Aristotle, frozen in his seat, still as a statue, still as a victim of the alien powers at work suddenly in his life, squeaked, "No. Father."

Amadeus drew the wild tangle of his hair back into a tight halo around his head. He smiled and let Aristotle see the old Lilithine blood rise in his eyes. Then he snapped the wristblade back and gathered his coat close to himself. He went to the great oaken double doors and threw them open to the above and the night and the city cowering like a collection of children afraid of the dark. To Alek.

Wind whistled down the corridors of the old house like whispered promises.

"Then let's get it on then, man," he said.

Inside the overstuffed chamber he awoke. He blinked up at the armory of defiant monsters' and heroes'

faces hanging on shields over him. And frowned. He shifted his weight, cramping his back on thin leather and sharp, nail-like coils. Pungent old tobacco, familiar.

And when a chill came to his temple he gasped. Where was he? A hand. But whose? Very dry.

"Mrs. B--Tahlia," he guessed.

"You got it, kid." Through the haze of her cigarette smoke her face shone like a white jewel, like the visage of some wartime songbird he'd forgotten the name of.

Alek tried to rise, but his body hurt in too many places--his hip, his ribs where he'd fractured one in his fall on the icy alley floor--and he gave it up after a moment of effort and too-much pain and lay back down.

Tahlia undid the b.u.t.tons on his shirt, took a wad of cloth-wrapped ice from an empty ashtray beside her and pressed it against his side. The immediate pain took his breath away. After a moment or two, Alek found he could speak. "How--?"

"Teresa brought you back. I'm strong, but not strong enough to haul your bulk, let me tell you. You're G.o.dd.a.m.n heavier than you look!"

He groaned and tasted cotton in his mouth, a hollow ache in the pit of his stomach. His body was mending, but it was running out of juice again. He was hungry. He ignored it. He concentrated on the stinging ache in his side instead. How do you know where I need it, Tahlia? He made a face--he felt like he was breathing through ground gla.s.s--and decided not to verbalize his musings.

"I have my ways," Tahlia answered and smiled at her patient's astounded expression.

Alek carefully shook his head. Byron's blood had worked mysterious miracles over Tahlia's mortal flesh, that was for certain. "More to you...Tahlia...than I thought," he managed.

"But of course," Tahlia proclaimed with her big false pride. "I am a veritable jungle of talent, don't y'know."

She winked. "An old jungle, granted, but that fact need go no further than this room, right?"

Alek laughed and that hurt too. "Help me up?"

Tahlia eased him into a slumped sitting position. And when she was certain her patient wouldn't slide, she poured Alek a mug of spicy foreign whiskey from the decanter on her husband's desk and handed it to him.

Alek put it to his lips, then away. The smell was unbelievably offensive; how could he have ever drunk this stuff in the past? "Tahlia," he said, holding onto the mug to be social, "exactly how much to you know?"

"Know." Tahlia settled on an art stool and tapped her temple thoughtfully with the painted tip of one finger.

"About art, a lot. Other things, some. I do know that Amadeus is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d of the first school, though. I know last time I seen Byron was the winter of '62 when the worm set his dogs on him. I do know what the Father's dogs can do. I know I never seen Byron again after he took to his heels." She stroked her chapped bottom lip with tragic ease. "I do know I want you to kill the f.u.c.ker for me and for Byron and mostly for yourself."

Alek sat back on the couch. "I don't know if I can do that, Tahlia. I don't know if I'm good enough."

"Then you ain't never gonna be free of him, are you?"